NATO: The United States, Transformation and the War in Afghanistan
| Date | 01 February 2009 |
| Published date | 01 February 2009 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2008.00349.x |
| Subject Matter | Article |
NATO: The United States,
Transformation and the War
in Afghanistan
Mark Webber
During the Bush years, NATO exhibited in stark form two trends which have long characterised its
development: periodic exposure to crisis and division, and a subordination to American leadership.
Despite signs of American indifference towards the alliance, talk of the Bush administration
levering a break with NATO was always overstated, particularly so during its second term of office.
Views of NATO after 2004 were shaped by Afghanistan giving rise, in fact, to a return to the
alliance on America’s part. NATO remains important to Bush’s successor but on terms which are
as demanding as those of his predecessors. NATO, in other words, is valued in so far as it accords
with current US foreign policy priorities. The safest assumption in this regard is that Obama will
continue to favour the trend towards a global NATOpursued by the Bush administration. However,
retreat (or defeat) in Afghanistan could hasten a contrary trend towards a consolidating NATO
with a renewed concentration on the wider Europe.
Keywords: NATO; Afghanistan; Bush; Obama
NATO’s fortunes have always been closely tied to the preferences and priorities of
American foreign policy. In many ways this has served the alliance well, consoli-
dating its status as the central institutional mechanism of the transatlantic relation-
ship and breathing life into the missions which have defined its purpose. Equally,
however, this dependence upon the US has left the alliance exposed to alterations
in US preferences. In the aftermath of the cold war it seemed NATO would remain
central to the US. The Clinton administration, vacillation in the Balkans notwith-
standing, was firmly committed to alliance renewal and enlargement, and contin-
ued to set some store by the principle of allied solidarity. The coming to power of
George W. Bush and the catalytic impact of 9/11 changed this position in seemingly
fundamental ways. The standard interpretation here is that the Bush administration
regarded NATO as militarily dispensable and considered its alliance partners as no
longer worthy of privileged diplomatic treatment. Further, whereas NATO’s strate-
gic development—whether in the cold war or during its reorientation towards
non-Article V crisis management in the 1990s—had been built upon allied consen-
sus, no such settled view obtained in Bush’s agenda of gearing NATO up for global
missions and ‘the war on terror’. NATO, in other words, was left sidelined and
divided as US strategy ploughed ahead regardless (Andrews 2004).
It is certainly the case that some initiatives of the Bush administration were
intolerant of NATO and it is also true that the Bush years coincided with a lot of talk
The British Journal of
Politics and International Relations
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-856x.2008.00349.x BJPIR: 2009 VOL 11, 46–63
© 2008 The Author.Journal compilation © 2008 Political Studies Association
of NATO being in irremediable crisis. The standard view does, however, require
qualification on two grounds. First, NATO’s experience under Bush was not unique.
Before 2001, it had also experienced profound, even existential problems of adap-
tation, while subject also to the vagaries of American instrumentalism and caprice.
Second, the Bush administration was not entirely indifferent to NATO’s fortunes.
The first Bush term was marked by considerable scepticism but even then the US
pushed NATO’s ‘transformation’ agenda. During the second term, spurred by
events in Afghanistan, US policy was characterised by a return to the alliance.
A fundamental continuity remains, namely that NATO has and will continue to be
shaped by American influence. That said, the global agenda which US policy
favours could well be NATO’s undoing. Surveying the post-cold war period, the
further ‘out of area’ the alliance has gone the worse its problems have become, a
state of affairs that has culminated in the imbroglio of Afghanistan. As with previ-
ous crises in its 60-year history, NATO will no doubt live to fight another day, but
where and how it does so remain open questions.
Proceeding from these observations, the analysis of NATO below will be considered
by reference to three periods: before Bush, during Bush and after Bush. Such a
periodisation clearly implies that the Bush presidency had a singular effect upon
NATO; as we will see, this has been tempered by longer-term trends which stretch
across all three periods.
NATO before Bush
NATO in Crisis?
The first historic trend of note concerns NATO’sexposure to internal crisis. NATO has,
in fact, been held to be in decline almost since its inception. During the long years of
antagonism with the Soviet Union the alliance experienced a succession of deeply
controversial issues: the 1956 Suez Crisis, French withdrawal from NATO’sintegrated
military structures 10 years later and ongoing problems of nuclear strategy stretching
from‘flexible response’ in the 1960s to the deployment of Intermediate Nuclear Forces
(INF) in the 1980s. Each of these episodes was met with scholarly and journalistic
accounts of a NATO that was at best divided and, at worst, on the brink of dissolution.
On each occasion, however, it survived (Thies 2007).
The most straightforward reason for its longevity was the cohesion provided by the
common task of facing off Soviet communism. With the end of the cold war,
NATO’s crises thus acquired a new quality. As rapprochement with the Soviet
Union gathered pace from the late 1980s there was a widespread expectation that
NATO would disappear.West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, for
example, expressed the hope in a speech of March 1990 that eventually both NATO
and the Warsaw Pact would be superseded by a pan-European security organisation
modelled on the Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe. French
President François Mitterrand similarly put forward the idea of a European
Confederation, alluding to a future Europe without NATO. These expectations,
however, went unfulfilled. The so-called ‘architecture’ debate of the early 1990s
witnessed a successful championing of NATO on the part of the UK and the US and
NATO AND THE UNITED STATES 47
© 2008 The Author.Journal compilation © 2008 Political Studies Association
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